Steven Siegel

Steven Siegel (born 1953) is an American artist whose work includes public art, installation art, sculpture, collage and film.

He is most known for site-specific, outdoor sculptures, public art commissions and installations made from repurposed pre- and postconsumer materials, which have been influenced by concepts and processes derived from geology and evolutionary biology.

Writers relate his work in formal terms to minimalism, in its materials and emphasis on hands-on processes to postminimalism, and in its unconventional means (natural sites, community involvement, and embrace of ephemerality) to Land art.

His studio work has been exhibited at Marlborough Fine Art, Montalvo Arts Center, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Drawing Center, among other venues.

He has created commissioned works in cities and universities throughout the U.S. and Europe, in Australia, and Kazakhstan and Korea, and at the DeCordova Museum, Arte Sella Sculpture Park (Italy), Grounds for Sculpture, and Art Omi.

Siegel lives and works in Tivoli in upstate New York.

Siegel was born in White Plains, New York in 1953.

He graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1976 with a BA degree and earned an MFA from Pratt Institute in 1978.

After graduating, he lived in New York City's Chelsea district and worked as a carpenter, while producing abstract sculpture and drawings, often focused on interactions between man-made structures and landscape.

In the mid-1980s he became increasingly interested in geologic phenomena and concepts––most prominently John McPhee's notion of deep time—and began utilizing natural processes, such as sedimentation, stratification and compression, in his art.

A commission for the Snug Harbor Sculpture Festival in 1990 shifted his work's direction.

The festival was located on Staten Island, New York—then home to Fresh Kills, the world's largest landfill—which caused him to reflect on consumer waste as a future, human-generated "geology."

In response, he created New Geology #1 (1990), a 15-foot-tall, ten-foot-wide cylinder made of recycled newspapers layered like shales and crowned with earth, grasses and flowers, which New York Times critic Michael Brenson wrote, "sprout[ed] from the ground like an ancient circular tomb."

Over the next decade, Siegel gained wide recognition for related site-specific installations using pre- and post-consumer waste.

These were generally commissioned for U.S. universities, public parks and spaces, international exhibitions in Germany and Denmark, and venues such as the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Art Omi, and Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art.

He often designed the outdoor works to have an evolving, symbiotic relationship with their environments, including weathering and decomposition over long exhibition periods.

Writers distinguish Siegel's work by its combination of traditional sculptural aesthetics (abstraction, centrality of form and composition, craftsmanship) and unconventional means, such as repurposed indigenous materials, scientific concepts and evolving processes derived from nature, and strategies involving organic development, change and risk, and collaboration.

His work raises contradictory notions of natural versus artificial, found versus constructed, growth and decay, and time as something ephemeral and enduring, intelligible and incomprehensible.

Sculpture critic Patricia C. Phillips wrote, "There is a puzzling experience of dissonant beauty in these ungainly objects made of disposable, if not unsightly materials."

Siegel fabricates his pieces through painstaking processes of accumulation that build to common forms such as boulders, vessels, geological formations, immense artifacts or topographical maps.

Although not overtly political or message-oriented, they raise questions about consumption, waste and landscape, as well as sculptural practice itself in an eco-conscious world.

Siegel's site-specific public works fall into three broad categories: time-bound, outdoor newspaper structures; organic, linear works primarily made with shredded rubber; and large cubes or spheres of bound waste materials, often crushed plastic or aluminum containers.

Siegel's newspaper works generally take monolithic, concentrated forms, such as cylinders, hives, walls or towers.

They reference time through their layers of dated newsprint, methodical reiterative construction process, and gradual disintegration.

Siegel's first fully realized such work was New Geology #2 (1992), a newspaper, stone and flora installation in the woods near his home in Milan, New York.

Hood (Portland, 1993) was a thirteen-foot, cone-shaped sculpture topped by colorful flora, whose distinct layers were created by alternating placement of newspaper folds in or out.

The indoor work Repose (1997, Atlanta) consisted of a dark mound of shredded tires atop a shale-like stack of juice cartons that twisted through a large exhibition space.

Siegel constructed Squeeze II (1998, Appalachian State University) from old school newspapers and sod, wedging an undulating structure between a grove of hemlocks, the organic curves creating a dialogue with the site's rolling hills.

For Very Slow (1999, Art Omi), he constructed two newspaper towers in a stand of maple trees.

It was undertaken as an experiment in change, decay and rebirth, and by 2000, had largely disappeared into a landscape of overgrown vegetation.

In the 2000s, Siegel shifted his emphasis to studio work, producing abstract work inspired by evolutionary processes that ranged from intimate sculpture to ambitious multimedia installations.

This work relates to his large-scale outdoor work in its continued use of postconsumer materials and evolving processes of incremental accumulation and craft that build to larger wholes.

For Carbon String (2001, Neuberger Museum of Art), he created a slender, playful 200-foot organic form that incongruously snaked its way through the otherwise austere architectural plaza of SUNY Purchase.

For example, Bale (2001, University of Virginia) was a ten-foot, minimalist cube of crushed plastic bottles strapped together with rubber hose.

Later newspaper works include "Scale" (2002, Abington Art Center), Stories of Katrina (2005, Montalvo Arts Center), Bridge 2 (2009, Arte Sella, Italy), Suncheon Weave (2016, Korea), and Hill and Valley (2015, Sculpture in the Wild, Lincoln, MT), his largest newspaper piece.

Writers have noted the cyclical "lifespan" of such works, from material origins in paper produced from trees, to art returned to the landscape, through biodegradation by fungi, mushrooms and molds into soil from which new trees grow.

While the integration of Siegel's newspaper works blur boundaries between natural and constructed forms, his linear installations using rubber suggest organic, sometimes menacing intrusions into architectural settings.

Similar installations included Can Can (Bowling Green State University, 2002), a warped sphere of bound aluminum can discards; E-virus (2006, Stanford University), a cylinder formed from electronic waste; cubes of Grass Paper Glass (2006, Grounds For Sculpture), and Like a Buoy, like a Barrel (2019, Providence, RI), among others.

The rubber tentacle or tree-root-like forms of Carbon (2013, Canberra, Australia)—Siegel's largest permanent public work—ooze from a soffit and across the façade of a multi-use building once home to Australia's Department of Climate Change.

In other installations, Siegel created works in contrast to landscaped and idyllic sites that suggested both minimalist sculpture and functional objects such as collections of material en route to being recycled.